Metal Flesh (After Eden Series: Tek-Fall, Episode I)
Page 9
"Target has escaped!" she yells into her wrist-comm. "Have our drones target anything moving on the ground within the perimeter. Use localized EMP rounds. Target is a robot, I repeat, target is a combat robot."
"Done," a voice on the other end says.
Lila looks around at everyone. "Damn!"
"Lila, we'll find it," one of them says.
"We have never lost a target before—never. Why isn't it showing up on sensors?" She is staring at her wrist display. "There's no movement outside." Lila runs to the window to look out and stops.
In the sky is the robot—floating away on a single balloon coming out of its head. There is a head, its "good" arm, and multiple spine-like attachments from its neck; the rest of its body is gone. Whether the damage to those body parts was too severe, or with them it would be too heavy to escape, all its body parts have to be found too. Her optics zoom in on its face. The robot's eyes must have done the same. It smiles at her, cocks its hand like a gun, and pretends to shoot her. It waves good-bye.
Lila clenches her teeth in anger—robot bastard. "It's outside in the air!" She runs from the window, but stops when she sees her team about to open the case. "How many times did we scan that?"
"Multiple times, all frequencies."
"We scanned him too, but didn't detect it was a robot." She speaks into her wrist-comm. "The robot is in the air. It's flying away eastward on a balloon. Shoot it down!" She looks at the case again. They all look at each other; everyone is thinking the same thing.
The "walker" enters the room. The thin robot surrogate approaches the silver suitcase. Its hands are bio-sim tek—they not only look like human hands, but have the same temperature as real ones with a real pulse.
Boom! The explosion destroys the entire section of the two-story complex. Other parts of the building begin to collapse like falling dominoes.
Lila and her team look at each other. They watch from an elevated point, a quarter mile away. A SUV drives up with more of the team.
"Nothing," the driver says, shaking his head. "No balloon and nothing on the ground or in the air."
"It was flying away on a balloon! How fast could it go?"
Another team member says, "Lila, we have to go now. Grid drones will be here any minute."
She shakes her head in disgust. They must leave immediately.
The robot got away.
Continuum Meeting, Secret Location
10 p.m., 4 April 2093
Lila is doing the debriefing. What went wrong? Everyone is standing for the hastily put together meeting in the darkened room. Pictures of the Delivery Man are on the wall vid-screen—before and after he ripped off his face.
"It wasn't a surrogate. It was autonomous and nothing external was controlling it," she says.
"Please explain the technical designations again for me," asks one of members.
"An android looks like a person, externally. A sim-droid is a robot made to look like a person externally and internally. We have them ourselves in our medical training schools. But ours are made to mimic life for study, not for anything else. This one was made for combat purposes. It was intelligent and adaptive. I believe that it could think."
"Think?" asks a female Continuum member.
"It tried to trick us. Made us think an item was important when the only purpose of that item was to kill all of us. It knew we had set a trap for it. It even knew to use a non-tek way to escape from us. The bomb wasn't only to kill us, but to destroy its personal vehicle too, and deprive us any possible intel from it. Mr. Robot got away using a balloon. We used that method ourselves. We still don't know how it fooled our sensors; they showed biological readings."
M is among the attendees. She has a thought. "Maybe you're over-thinking it and your scanners weren't fooled. We've been thinking that this Man Made Out of String is a code name. Maybe, it's more literal. Maybe the Delivery Man is the delivery mechanism."
"The Man Made Out of String is inside and that's what our scanners were reading?"
"Yes, and since we know now that the silver case was, in fact, a decoy, maybe its purpose was always to be used as a fail-safe weapon; not to destroy a captor primarily, but ensure that a captor would never be able to capture it, either of them. It simply improvised for this situation."
"This was more—more than advanced adaptive and improvisational artificial intelligence. It gloated. It was gloating as it escaped from us. It was like real human emotions."
"It's not human so its emotions can't be human—only an illusion."
"Maybe M," one of the male Continuum members says, "they have created a true quantum-brain robot, not like all the quasi-quants they have in use. They've been working on it for decades. The want to turn humans into killing machines and give killing machines emotions."
"But use such tek as a hit-man?" says someone else.
"Why not?" someone else adds. "It's something they would do."
Lila sighs. "The fact is we failed. I let it get away."
"You didn't fail," M says. "We know what it is now and we know what to look for."
"If they have one, they have many more. Also, the government has lifted the ban on robotic self-replication in the commercial industry."
"Which means they have already done so for the military and intel industry."
"If we could have just gotten our hands on that tek..." Lila could kick herself.
"You got the intel we needed. Others will take over from here. This Delivery Man will see us again."
"I still feel I failed."
"Lila, don't think that," M says. "The mission wasn't the Delivery man. The mission was the Man Made Out of String. We know a lot more now than we did before. The Delivery Man is an added bonus. And Lila, we have thinking robots too."
"The Cube," Secret Location
8:32 a.m., 5 April 2093
Mr. West tours the underground facility with his staff. They are sitting in an open air flying saucer-type hovercraft to survey the "warehouse." Robot arms make humanoid robots, one after another, on an assembly line. The room is filled from the ground to the ceiling with the units.
They leave the hovercraft and take the moving walkway back to executive offices. One of his deputies is waiting at the elevators with a man and woman he's never seen before.
A century ago, religious Americans named things of science after Greek and Roman gods. Today, Pagans name their machines from, as they would say, Jew-Christian mythology.
"Sir, you wanted to see Adam and Eve before you left."
West looks at the anthro-droids and grabs each of their wrists. "I can feel a pulse and warmth. We really can make them."
"We didn't make them, sir. Our robots did." She smiles. "They can make them look like any living thing in the world."
West is pleased, but he notices his chief security agent's face.
"What?"
"We had a breach yesterday, sir. Unauthorized people may have seen one of our independent models yesterday. We were only informed this morning."
"Independent models? What independent models? No unit is allowed out of my facility without my authorization."
"Special Services out of the White House commissioned some units for domestic and international operations recently."
"You mean black operations? This is unconscionable. I shut that interference down four years ago. The unauthorized personnel were whom exactly?"
"They may have been domestic terrorists." West mouth hangs open as he listens. "Sir, they wouldn't have even known what they saw, if they saw anything at all."
"We have an ultra-top secret program and we allow terrorists to see them?"
"They wouldn't have known what they saw, sir."
"Please tell me they weren't the Jew-Christian ones?"
The chief agent thinks for a moment. "They were, sir, but...what does that matter?"
"The sim-droid program was inspired by them! All this Jew-Christians are Trogs is all propaganda. None of it is true. Letting them see them is like
announcing, at the top of our lungs, that we have dramatically upgraded our robotic forces. They'll do the same and they will not be foolish enough to show us what they come up with. Get me Special Services on the phone! We will cease all the black op nonsense with my robots. I'll speak with the President again if I have to. Wait...which program was it? What was compromised exactly?"
"There are hundreds of them, sir. It will take time to find out, but I will call now."
"It probably was the Delivery Man program, sir," another agent says.
West is speechless again. "That's our joint-op with Garrison on the New People Project. This is...worse. Not one ultra top-secret program compromised, but both, both our robotics and genetics warfare programs." West is in a state of near-panic. "I need the President on the phone, now! This is a priority, an emergency...urgent! And find me Garrison, too. Where is he? He couldn't have allowed this to happen on purpose. Where is he?"
"He is with the Homeland Director at the Lagoon, sir."
"He's with whom at the Lagoon?" West's face is red.
"An unscheduled tour, it was last minute, sir."
"The White House has never sent her here, to the Cube. Why is she there?"
"We don't know, sir."
"This is politics again, all of it. They don't respect us, this constant organic bigotry to the synthetic. All of us are robots in a way—you, me, all humankind. The human body is an organic machine. We're just using metal for flesh. My Program must be respected. It may be the savior of this country one day. Instead they send the Homeland Director, not here to the Cube to see our progress and accomplishments, but to Monster Lagoon to see the freak show."
The After Eden Series: Tek-Fall concludes in Episode II, Hell's Menagerie.
Thank you for reading!
Dear Reader,
I hope you enjoyed Metal Flesh. The story continues in the soon-to-be released novella, Hell's Menagerie (After Eden Tek-Fall, Episode II). They are companion novellas to the main seven-book After Eden Series, occurring after the first two books, Thy Kingdom Fall and Stars & Scorpions, and before Rising Leviathan (Book 3) and Red Halo (Book 4). The After Eden science fiction and international thriller series is the events leading to the outbreak of World War III on September 11, 2125.
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REFERENCES
Sprocket is also in Thy Kingdom Fall (After Eden Series, Book #1).
The mentioned Logan is in Thy Kingdom Fall (After Eden Series, Book #1).
Goth Lila is also in Thy Kingdom Fall (After Eden Series, Book #1) and the beginning of Stars & Scorpions (After Eden Series, Book #2).
The mentioned Goli is also in Thy Kingdom Fall (After Eden Series, Book #1) and Stars & Scorpions (After Eden Series, Book #2).
Edison Blair and Bunny are also in Thy Kingdom Fall (After Eden Series, Book #1).
Haggard and the League of Artifacts, Curios, Curiosities, Mementos, Relics, and Antiquities are also in Stars and Scorpions (After Eden Series, Book #2).
M and her husband "General" Moses are also in Thy Kingdom Fall (After Eden Series, Book #1).
Kristiana and the Amish are also in Thy Kingdom Fall (After Eden Series, Book #1).
The Resistance and Continuum are introduced in Thy Kingdom Fall (After Eden Series, Book #1).
The African Collective is discussed in Stars and Scorpions (After Eden Series, Book #2) and fully shown in Hell's Menagerie (After Eden Series: Tek-Fall - Episode II).
The mentioned Magi are in Thy Kingdom Fall (After Eden Series, Book #1), Rising Leviathan (After Eden Series, Book #3), and Red Halo (After Eden Series, Book #4).
The mentioned Shogun are in Rising Leviathan (After Eden Series, Book #3) and Red Halo (After Eden Series, Book #4).
President T. Wilson is also in Thy Kingdom Fall (After Eden Series, Book #1) and Rising Leviathan (After Eden Series, Book #3).
The Man Made Out of String is introduced in Thy Kingdom Fall (After Eden Series, Book #1).
Project New People is introduced in Stars and Scorpions (After Eden Series, Book #2).
The mentioned world summit is in Rising Leviathan (After Eden Series, Book #3).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Austin Dragon's After Eden Series includes Thy Kingdom Fall (Book #1), Stars and Scorpions (Book #2), Rising Leviathan (Book #3), and the companion novella, Metal Flesh (After Eden Tek-Fall, Episode I). He is a native New Yorker, but has called Los Angeles, California home for the last twenty years. Words to describe him, in no particular order: U.S. Army; English teacher; one-time resident of Paris; political junkie; movie buff; campaign manager and staffer of presidential and gubernatorial campaigns; Fortune 500 corporate recruiter; renaissance man; dreamer. He is currently working on the next books in the After Eden Series and will also release new series and new genres in 2015!
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COPYRIGHT
Published by Well-Tailored Books, California
Metal Flesh / After Eden Series: Tek-Fall (Episode I)
978-0-615-62804-2 (ebook)
http://www.austindragon.com
Copyright © 2014 by Austin Dragon
Book cover design by Leslie K.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.